On Media

Pulitzer prize fight

By DYLAN BYERS

04/16/2014 10:16 AM EDT

ABC News has accused The Center for Public Integrity of downplaying the network's contributions to a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report, setting off a bitter public dispute between two news organizations that once worked as partners.

On Tuesday, ABC News President Ben Sherwood sent a four-page letter to CPI's executive director, accusing him of omitting the names of ABC News reporters in his submission to the Pulitzer committee.

"We believe that our reporters ... should share in this high honor as they shared in the long months of reporting and producing the stories," Sherwood wrote. Sherwood also has promised to raise the issue with the Pulitzer board and with CPI's board of directors.

CPI Executive Director Bill Buzenberg says that ABC News is overstating its contributions to the story: “ABC is seeking to take credit for a large body of work that it did not produce," he wrote in a draft of his response to Sherwood, which he shared with POLITICO.

The public spat, which is ongoing, threatens to tarnish what is perhaps the most high-minded moment in journalism, as the industry's most prestigious honor has degenerated into a round of finger-pointing between two reputable news organizations.

At issue is the network's contribution to a yearlong investigation, led by CPI's Chris Hamby, into how doctors, lawyers and members of the coal industry worked together to deny black lung medical benefits to miners. Johns Hopkins Medicine suspended its black lung program in the wake of the report.

In an email to POLITICO, ABC News SVP Jeffrey Schneider said CPI "showed a stunning lack of integrity and misled the Pulitzer board with its submission, which diminished our work to the point of non-existence."

"If the Pulitzers rule won't recognize our reporters work that's one thing. But as partners, we expected CPI to make a strong case for our collaboration over the past year," he said. "Instead, CPI falsely claimed that we had nothing to do with this work. It is untrue and extremely disappointing."

CPI and ABC News have shared recognition for the black lung benefits story in the past. In March, the Harvard Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting was awarded to Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Jim Morris and Chris Zubak-Skees of The Center for Public Integrity and Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz of ABC News. Next month, the White House Correspondents' Association will honor "The Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with ABC News." On Wednesday, they received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Television news organizations are excluded from the Pulitzer Prizes, which honor newspaper and digital reporting. In his email, Sherwood wrote, "There is precedent to include the broadcast partner reporters in Pulitzer submissions." That may be an imperfect example: Lowell Bergman, of PBS's "Frontline," won the award for his work for The New York Times.

Nevertheless, Buzenberg says that Sherwood and Schneider are overstating the network's role.

"The truth is that ABC did not join the investigation until partway through; it focused on only one part of a multipart series; and its reporting was sporadic and almost entirely geared toward the needs of television, not original content for the print series," he wrote in the draft of his response.

"We value these sorts of partnerships and were happy to work with ABC. But let’s be honest about the contributions of each party. Chris Hamby lived and breathed this investigation almost exclusively for a year. ABC dropped in periodically over the course of a few months in between work on many other stories," he wrote. "In other words, I agree with your proposal: Let’s show some integrity."

But the role ABC News played in bringing the issue to public attention cannot be overstated. When Johns Hopkins announced that it had suspended its black lung program, it cited ABC News — not CPI — as the cause.

"Providing the absolute best, most accurate and comprehensive patient care is our mission at Johns Hopkins Medicine," the organization said in a statement. "We take very seriously the questions raised in a recent ABC News report about our second opinions for pneumoconiosis including black lung disease, and we are carefully reviewing the news story and our pneumoconiosis service."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) cited both ABC News and CPI when he introduced "black lung" legislation to provide new protections for coal workers.

But the true extent of ABC's reporting efforts is more difficult to measure. The 25,000-word report submitted to the Pulitzer Board was written entirely by Hamby, but ABC and CPI had an agreement that they would each author their respective reports.

In an effort to bolster his argument, Buzenberg provided correspondence from Sig Gissler, the Pulitzer Prize administrator, who described the submission as "overwhelmingly Hamby's work."

Gissler also told Buzenberg that "the rules expressly state that the eligible entity must do the preponderance of the work; specific elements produced by the ineligible entity (such as ABC video) cannot be entered; and if there is a prize, it will go ONLY to the eligible organization that submitted the work."

"So, based on the entry, the prize to the Hamby alone is warranted," Gissler wrote.

Schneider told POLITICO that ABC News had no intention of diminishing Hamby's work; only that it wanted to see greater recognition for its own reporters.

"We believe that Chris Hamby did extraordinary work and the claim by CPI that we are trying to horn in on Chris's Pulitzer is ridiculous," Schneider said. "We believe that he deserves all of this recognition. What amazes us is that as partners in it we would be thrown under the bus completely by CPI."

UPDATE (10:51 a.m.): Buzenberg elaborated on the issue in a phone conversation Wednesday morning (edited and condensed for clarity):

The Pulitzer is a fantastic award for print and digital organizations. It's pretty clear in the rules. If ABC wants to win a Pulitzer they should get into the print business and do writing. They did not write the 25,000 words that we did for the Pulitzer entry.

The 25,000 words that we submitted to the Pulitzer Board were written by Chris Hamby. This was our report from our incredible reporter who spent a year doing this. He knows it forwards and backwards. ABC would be completely lost without the work that he did.

We had a partnership with ABC. ABC does fantastic television. I love the fact that they took our work and put it on television. What they didn't do was write this report or do this investigation. For a year I've watched Hamby sit at a desk stacked with thousands and thousands of documents. That's how the investigation was conducted.

ABC News contributed to the impact that the report had. They were a great megaphone, and it clearly helped with the impact. But ABC would not have a television report without the work that Chris Hamby did over the course of the year.

UPDATE (11:11 a.m.): Schneider, the ABC News SVP, responded to Buzenberg's claim that the network "took CPI's work and put it on television":

"That is an outrageous lie, and Bill knows [it's] a lie. We worked jointly on this investigation for a year. We have been generous with credit to Chris in every way and will continue to be so. But the administration of CPI is telling whoppers. [Johns] Hopkins and Sen. Rockefeller were responding to ABC News and the impact that these reports had were due to the collaboration. To say otherwise is a petty distortion."

More updates after the jump.

UPDATE (11:35 a.m.): Schneider forwarded the draft of a statement Buzenberg had proposed releasing on Tuesday, in which he spoke to the "collaboration" between CPI and ABC News. The latter felt that the statement did not go far enough in recognizing the work of ABC's reporters:

The Center for Public Integrity is deeply honored to receive its first Pulitzer Prize, for Chris Hamby’s groundbreaking investigation revealing how the coal industry beats back miners’ claim for benefits for the black lung disease taking their breath and, often, their lives. ... We also want to highlight the valuable contribution of the ABC News Investigative Unit, including chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross and investigative producer Matthew Mosk. ABC News partnered with us in the series — exploring how doctors at Johns Hopkins Medicine failed to see evidence of black lung disease even when other experts did. ... This is a testament to the power of collaboration and the impact it can produce.

UPDATE (11:37 a.m.): Kerry Smith, the ABC News SVP for Editorial Quality, has sent the following letter to Buzenberg on behalf of the network. Schneider said it will likely be ABC's last word on the matter:

Bill,

First let me assure you again we have no quarrel with Chris Hamby’s being awarded a Pulitzer. Indeed, it is well deserved and we are thrilled for him. He did amazing work and is a first rate reporter.

Chris wrote CPI’s articles and our team wrote ABC NEWS articles. That was by design (per our agreement) and it’s misleading to suggest that the pieces didn’t rely on the foundational work contributed by all involved. It’s foundational work that is cited in the Pulitzer guidelines.

We take issue with the entry as misleading and dishonest. The award was for investigative reporting and as you know, all three reporters were deeply involved in the reporting. Under our agreement, credit would be shared in every instance and in fact, Chris Hamby is cited as a producer in our broadcast award submissions although he never wrote a script or spent a day in the edit room. He deserves that credit because of the excellent reporting that underlies the entire body of work. We would have never sought to exclude or disqualify him because he didn’t shoot or edit or produce a single frame of our broadcast reports. The position of integrity is: all for one, one for all. We were partners.

If the impact of the investigation was important to the committee’s awarding the honor then the impact stems from our joint work. It’s the impact articles that carry all three bylines. The impact of the investigation is cited in your entry letter. Quote: “The investigation prompted immediate impact. Two days after the Center’s report Johns Hopkins suspended it’s black lung program, pending a review.” That is misleading as [Johns] Hopkins only cited ABC NEWS’s, work not CPI, when they suspended the program. Hopkins wrote: “We take very seriously the questions raised in a recent ABC NEWS report.” We shared the credit for that impact with CPI because it was a joint investigation. The right thing to do.

We are not trying to “steal” Chris’s prize as you have suggested. We understand the rules. What we cannot abide by is the suggestion that our by- lined reporters work did not contribute to the impact of this joint investigation.

Your timeline is inaccurate. ABC NEWS did not enter this investigation months into the project, as you stated in your submission to the Pulitzer jury. We joined forces on October 31, 2012. We have a great deal of documentation of that fact. Matt met routinely with Chris and his editors to share reporting, and to strategize about the reporting still left to do. We forwarded every transcript of every interview by ABC news and Chris was present during the key interview Brian Ross did with Dr.Paul Wheeler. It took Matt months to arrange the interview. We invited Chris to the interview because we were partners. I think we can all agree that interview was pivotal.

ABC NEWS did not parachute into this story. Such a suggestion is ludicrous. Matt and Brian made repeated reporting trips to West Virginia, our division spent tens of thousands of dollars on this yearlong enterprise and all work was shared.

We submitted and successfully won joint entries a citing “a yearlong investigation” which CPI approved. It’s one thing if the rules of the Pulitzer Prize do not allow a joint entry from ABC NEWS but to diminish and downplay our work is inexcusable. The NYT continues to proudly cite their FRONTLINE partner on the 2004 win despite the fact as a broadcast partner they are not allowed to be on the citation.

CPI’s behavior when the award was announced was the opposite. Even in celebration, our reporter’s work was diminished. The option of submitting all three by-lined reporters’ names on the entry was clearly not even [considered] by your organization.

ABC NEWS and CPI have for decades collaborated on investigations. Ben Sherwood has served on the board of this honorable and important organization founded by former ABC NEWS producer Chuck Lewis. CPI’s management’s decisions in submitting an inaccurate and misleading entry without consulting us and not acknowledging our true role after winning have brought us to this point. In a world of decreasing resources for in-depth investigative journalism that is very sad outcome.

Thank you for your letter of last night regarding the black lung investigation, which was also sent to our full Board of Directors and the news media. I have to assume this is all part of an unfortunate PR campaign by ABC News.

It is curious that you repeatedly reference dictionary definitions of “integrity” in an apparent attempt to play off the Center’s name and imply hypocrisy. In fact, it is the behavior of ABC that should give rise to questions about honesty and moral uprightness.

Though you have framed the issue as the Center seeking to diminish ABC’s contributions, the reality is quite the opposite: ABC is seeking to take credit for a large body of work that it did not produce. These are the facts, as confirmed under the very strict Pulitzer Prize rules by the Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler again just yesterday:

Bill: I've reviewed the entry again. It is overwhelmingly Hamby's work and was entered by the center in conformance with our rules on limited partnerships (SEE BELOW). The rules expressly state that the eligible entity must do the preponderance of the work; specific elements produced by the ineligible entity (such as ABC video) cannot be entered; and if there is a prize it will go ONLY to the eligible organization that submitted the work.

So, based on the entry, the prize to the Hamby alone is warranted. Best, SG

The truth is that ABC did not join the investigation until part-way through, it focused on only one part of a multi-part series, and its reporting was sporadic and almost entirely geared toward the needs of television, not original content for the print series.

We value these sorts of partnerships and were happy to work with ABC. But let’s be honest about the contributions of each party. Chris Hamby lived and breathed this investigation almost exclusively for a year. ABC dropped in periodically over the course of a few months between work on many other stories.

Emails and drafts leading up to the airdate of ABC’s “Nightline” segment show that ABC depended to a remarkable degree on Chris’ access to sources, documents and data and his expertise on complex issues — all of which repeatedly saved ABC from making embarrassing factual errors in broadcast segments and online stories.

The Center is prepared to show in great detail how little ABC’s Brian Ross and Matt Mosk understood about even the most fundamental concepts and key facts and how they repeatedly turned to Chris to advise them or, in some instances, to do their work for them.

Draft scripts leading up to the airdate of the “Nightline” segment show serious factual inaccuracies by ABC and a continued lack of understanding of basic, key concepts. If not for Chris’ intervention, upon finally being shown the scripts, ABC would have found itself facing withering, legitimate criticism.

ABC has never acknowledged its extraordinary reliance on Chris for even the most basic information about this highly technical and complex story. Chris, of course, has never complained to ABC about this, despite repeated statements by ABC on air, online and in press releases that erroneously made it appear as if ABC was the driving force behind this project.

It is incredibly insulting for ABC to not only fail to acknowledge Chris’ indispensable work solely for ABC’s benefit, but to go even further and suggest that the opposite is true — that the Center is downplaying ABC’s work. A mountain of evidence shows this is not true.

I urge you to go to your reporters and engage in serious self-examination. I think your honest appraisal can reach no conclusion aside from this: At every step of the way, ABC turned to Chris for his longstanding connections to key sources in the coal mining community, his expertise in complex legal and medical issues and his vast trove of evidence, painstakingly gathered over a long period of time.

Now that the series has won high praise, however, ABC seems to have changed its tune. Suddenly, both parties contributed equally, in ABC’s telling.

In other words, I agree with your proposal: Let’s show some integrity.